If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are just a few ideas for making sure you use the two most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as effectively as you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You can distribute that content as widely as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you will feel more confident about how effective that content will be.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.